SUBMARINE _v._ WAR-SHIP
The use of the submarine for attacking war-ships is, of course,
perfectly legitimate, and the powers and possibilities of this weapon
were much discussed before the War. Some writers of note believed that
the day of the big battleship was practically over--that such vessels
could be ‘pulled down’ with certainty by any enterprising submarine
commander, without any corresponding risk to his own boat. Others, with
cooler or more scientific heads, maintained that there is an answer to
every weapon, and that the introduction of submarines would not change
the principles of war. The result has shown that the latter school of
opinion was right. The submarine has achieved some striking successes
here and there against the larger ships of war, but has not rendered
them obsolete or kept them from going about their true business, the
control of the sea; and as time goes on, it is rather the submarine
than the battle-ship which is found too vulnerable to challenge a
fight, when neither has the advantage of surprise.
This legitimate use of the submarine formed part, as we have seen, of
both British and German war policy--though, in our own case, it was
originally considered rather as a means of defence against invasion;
than of offence on the high seas. It was, therefore, not unnatural that
the U-boat should score first. Besides, we were offering a hundred
targets to one. Our cruisers were all over the North Sea, while no
German ships could be met there except an occasional mine-layer
like the _Königin Luise_. This state of things has only become more
invariable as the War has developed; and the most remarkable result, so
far, of the contest between the two submarine services is the practical
equality of the score on the two sides. With infinitely fewer and more
difficult chances, the British submarine has actually surpassed the
U-boat’s record, in successes obtained against enemy ships of war, and
immensely surpassed it in the proportion of successes to opportunities.
The first war-ship to fall to the torpedo of a submarine was the
_Pathfinder_, a light cruiser of about 5,000 tons, with a complement of
268 officers and men, of whom some half were saved. The boat which sank
her was the U. 21, commanded by Lieutenant Hersing, who raised high
hopes in Germany which he was not destined to fulfil.
A greater captain is said to have been Captain Otto Weddigen, who
achieved the sensational feat of pulling down three of our cruisers in
one hour, and was supposed by some of his fellow-countrymen to have
solved the problem of reducing the British Fleet to an equality with
the German. But he owed more to luck and our inexperience than to any
peculiar skill of his own. In the early morning of September 22, 1914,
he stalked the armoured cruisers _Aboukir_, _Hogue_, and _Cressy_, old
ships of 12,000 tons and 18 knots’ speed, which were out on patrol
duty in the North Sea, and were about to take up their stations for
the day’s work. The danger of the submarine was hardly yet fully
recognised; and when the _Aboukir_ was struck by a violent explosion,
the general belief in the squadron was that she had run foul of a mine.
She listed heavily and sank slowly, her funnels almost level with the
water, and the smoke coming out as from the water’s edge. The other two
ships closed her at once, and had got within two cables of her when the
_Hogue_ was struck in turn by two torpedoes almost simultaneously. The
effect was extraordinary. ‘She seemed,’ says an eye-witness, ‘to give
one jump out of the water and then to go straight down.’ So quickly
did she go, that she was out of sight long before _Aboukir_, who took
twenty minutes to sink, so that her men (as one of them said) ‘got time
to do the best.’
The moment the _Hogue_ was struck, it was realised that submarines were
at work, and _Cressy_ opened fire from one of her 9·2-in. guns. She
was hit herself by two torpedoes immediately afterwards, and listed
heavily, so that everything began to roll down the deck. But she sank
slowly and her gunners kept up their fire most gallantly, giving
up their chance of being saved for the hope of killing their enemy
before they went down. They fired a dozen shots in all, and are said
by Lieutenant Harrison to have sunk one of the attacking U-boats. ‘I
reckon her gunners,’ said a survivor from the _Aboukir_, ‘were about
the bravest men that ever lived. They kept up the firing until she
had 40 degrees of list. They died gamely, did those fellows.’ Their
shipmates were worthy of them. ‘There was absolutely no panic on the
cruiser; the men were as calm as at drill.’ At last some trawlers came
up; and, after two hours, some destroyers. Only 777 of the three
ships’ crews were saved, out of a total of about 2,100; and 60 officers
were lost out of 120. ‘Some of our men must have been in the water
for three or four hours. The _Aboukir_ men were taken to the _Hogue_;
when the _Hogue_ was sunk, they were taken to the _Cressy_; when the
_Cressy_ was taken, they were thrown in the sea again. Yet here they
are, and there is only one thing they want--to go to sea again and have
another whack at the men who torpedoed them.’
Possibly they had their wish; for some of them may have been on board
the British ship which, a few months later, destroyed U. 29 (Weddigen’s
boat) by a brilliant and almost reckless feat of seamanship, which, in
later days, will form a favourite yarn of the Service.
The only other war-ship lost by submarine action in 1914 was the
_Hawke_, an armoured cruiser twenty-five years old, which was torpedoed
while on patrol in the North Sea, and sank in ten minutes, only seventy
of those on board being saved. The year 1915 began badly for us, and
ended by being decidedly our worst year on one side the account, though
it was our best on the other. At 2 o’clock in the morning of January
1, a squadron of battle-ships, of the older types of 1901 and 1902,
was steaming down Channel in line ahead. There was a gale blowing,
and the sea was running high. The last two ships of the line were
the _London_ and the _Formidable_, the latter of which was suddenly
shaken by a violent explosion, and not long afterwards by a second
one. Even then, the ship did not sink till forty-five minutes after;
and if it had not been for the rough weather and icy water, boats and
rafts might have been got away with most of the crew. As it was, no
steam-pinnaces could be got out, and the oars of the 42-foot cutter
and other boats were nearly all smashed against the ship’s sides. The
whole company, from the officers, giving quiet orders on the bridge,
to the men smoking on the slant deck, behaved as if at manœuvres, and
Captain Loxley, who went down with his ship, distinguished himself
by signalling to the _London_ not to stand by him, as there was a
submarine about. One boat came ashore at Lyme Regis, with forty-six
live men and nine dead in her; seventy more men were brought in after
three hours’ hard and dangerous work by the 50-ton smack, _Provident_,
of Brixham--William Pillar, skipper. His crew consisted of three men
and a cook-boy. Out of a total complement of more than 700, only 201
were saved in all. Among the lost were thirty-four officers, including
eight midshipmen and a sub-lieutenant.
On March 11, the _Bayano_, an armed merchant-cruiser, was torpedoed off
the Firth of Clyde, and went down with 170 of her 200 men. On April 11,
the _Wayfarer_ transport was torpedoed, and ran ashore off Queenstown.
On May 1, the _Recruit_, a small torpedo-boat of 385 tons, was sunk in
the North Sea, with thirty-nine out of her sixty-four officers and men.
[Illustration: ‘Were brought in by the 50-ton smack, _Provident_, of
Brixham.’]
Then came two grave losses on two consecutive days. The British Fleet
off Gallipoli had already lost the _Irresistible_ and _Ocean_ by
floating mines; and now the U-boats succeeded in inflicting another
double loss on us, at a moment when the Army needed the strongest
support to ensure success. On May 26, a single torpedo sank the
_Triumph_, while she was co-operating with the Australian and New
Zealand troops before Ari Burnu. She was accompanied by an escort of
two destroyers, and was about to open fire when the submarine got a
shot into her. She listed till her deck touched the water, and in five
minutes capsized completely, but remained floating for twenty minutes,
keel upwards. Some 460 of the officers and men were saved.
The _Triumph_ was not designed for our Navy, but taken over from the
builder’s yard, and the curious arch formed by her derricks made her
outline a conspicuously foreign feature in our Fleet. The _Majestic_,
on the other hand, which quickly followed her to destruction, was a
typically British vessel, and gave her name to the whole class, built
in 1895 and the following years, and then greatly admired. She also, on
May 27, was supporting the army in action on the Gallipoli peninsula,
when a German torpedo ended her twenty years’ career. She carried about
760 officers and men, but nearly all of them were saved. In June, two
torpedo-boats, the _Greenfly_ and _Mayfly_, of 215 tons, were sunk;
the _Roxburgh_, a 10,000-ton cruiser, was slightly damaged; and the
_Lightning_ torpedo-boat, of 275 tons, was disabled, but brought
into harbour. On August 8, a U-boat sank one of our large auxiliary
cruisers, the _India_, off the coast of Norway and in Norwegian
territorial waters. By this breach of the rules, she succeeded in
killing 10 officers and 150 men, out of a complement of over 300.
The losses so far enumerated were all strictly naval losses. Up to this
time, although we had been transporting troops by the hundred thousand
from Canada and Australia to England, and from England to France,
India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Gallipoli, our numbers had hardly
suffered the smallest diminution by submarine action. Again, during the
last three years (1916-18) we have had minor losses now and then; but
the one and only real disaster of this kind came upon us in 1915. On
August 14, the British transport, the _Royal Edward_, was in the Ægean,
carrying reinforcements for the 29th Division in Gallipoli, and details
of the Royal Army Medical Corps, when she was torpedoed by a German
submarine and sank rapidly. She had on board 32 military officers and
1,350 troops, in addition to her own crew of 220 officers and men.
Of all these, only 600 were saved; and for the first time in modern
war we suffered the cruel loss of soldiers to the strength of a whole
battalion killed--not in battle, but helpless and unresisting, without
the chance of firing a shot or delivering a last charge with the
bayonet. The ship herself was a less harrowing loss; but she was a fine
vessel that we could ill spare--a steel triple-screw steamer of 11,117
tons and 545 feet in length. She, like her sister ship, the _Royal
George_, was originally built for the Egyptian Mail Steamship Company,
and ran between Marseilles and Alexandria. Her later service was
carrying the mails for the Canadian Northern Steamship Company between
Avonmouth and Montreal--and now she had returned to Eastern waters,
only to give an isolated and inconclusive triumph to a desperate enemy.
The remainder of the year saw many attempts by the U-boat commanders
to repeat this success; but they mostly ended in failure. On September
2, the transport _Southland_ was hit by a torpedo, but got into Madras
under her own steam, with a loss of 30 men killed in the explosion.
On September 19, the _Ramazan_, with 385 Indian troops on board, was
shelled and sunk by a submarine, off Antikythera. In October, the
transport _Marquette_ was sunk in the Ægean. On November 3, the
transport _Mercian_ was heavily shelled, and had nearly 100 killed and
wounded. On November 5 the _Tara_, armed boarding-steamer, was sunk
in the Bay of Sollum, on the eastern border of Egypt; and immediately
afterwards two small Customs cruisers--the _Prince Abbas_ of 300 tons
and the _Abdul Moneim_ of 450--were sunk at the same place, and no
doubt by the same pair of U-boats.
The year 1916 showed clearly that, as a weapon against armed ships, the
U-boat was not likely to succeed, after the first period of surprise
was past. During this year we lost three mine-sweepers--_Primula_,
_Clacton_, and _Genista_; two empty transports--the _Russian_ and
_Franconia_; the _Zaida_ and _Duke of Albany_, armed steamers of the
auxiliary patrol; and one destroyer, the _Lassoo_, which was sunk with
a loss of six men, either by mine or torpedo, off the coast of Holland.
To this insignificant list must be added one disaster of a more serious
kind. As we have already noted, our control of the North Sea was a
continuous and effective control, and every effort was made, especially
after the flight of the Germans from Jutland, to bring out the enemy
fleet from its hiding-place. These efforts, of course, involved
the exposure of our advanced forces to certain risks. On August
19, there was a report that the High Canal Fleet was at sea again.
Hope outstripped belief, and light cruisers were sent out in every
direction to find the enemy. Two of these, the _Nottingham_ and the
_Falmouth_--good ships of 5,400 and 5,250 tons--were torpedoed and sunk
while scouting. Here again it was the loss of the men which we felt
most. The ships were new and useful ones; but they could be replaced,
and they belonged to a class in which the enemy’s force, since the
battle of Jutland, had been deficient, almost to a disabling degree.
There was no ground for the German hope that our naval superiority
could be permanently whittled away by rare and fractional losses like
these. Our Battle Fleet continued to hold up theirs, and our blockade
of their coasts was in no degree weakened.
The record of 1917, and the first half of 1918, is even more
significant. The German submarine effort was more and more completely
diverted from legitimate to illegitimate war--from the attack on
the enemy’s armed forces, to the destruction of non-combatants and
neutrals in mercantile shipping of any kind. British destroyers, going
everywhere, facing every kind of risk, and protecting everyone before
themselves, now and again furnished an item to the German submarine
bag; but the ‘regardless’ campaign against the world’s trade and the
world’s tonnage was now the U-boats’ chief occupation. One legitimate
objective they did still set before themselves--the destruction or
hindrance of transport for the United States army between the shores
of America and Europe. Again and again during 1917, and even in the
earlier days of 1918, assurances were given to the German people by
Admiral von Tirpitz, by Admiral von Capelle, by the Prussian Minister
of Finance in the Diet, and by the chief military writers in the Press,
that the promise of an American army was a boast and a deception, that
the American troops could not and would not cross the Atlantic, because
of the triumphant activity of the U-boats. Of the complete failure to
make good these assurances no better account need be given than that
supplied by the German Admiralty, in answer to the complaints of their
own people. Towards the end of July 1918, when there was no longer
any possibility of concealing the presence of a large and victorious
American force in France, Admiral von Holtzendorff, the Admiralty Chief
of Staff, gave the following explanation to the _Kölnische Zeitung_.
He admitted the success of the Allies in improving oversea transport,
especially the transport of troops from America. But in reply to the
statement that there was in Germany much disappointment that the
submarines had sunk so few of the American transports, he asked, with
truly Prussian effrontery, how _could_ submarines be specially employed
against American transports. ‘The Americans,’ he said, ‘have at their
disposition, for disembarkation, the coasts from the North of Scotland
to the French Mediterranean ports, with dozens of landing-places.
Ought we to let our submarines lie in wait before these ports, to see
whether they can possibly get a shot at a strongly protected American
transport, escorted by fast convoying vessels? The convoys do not
arrive with the regularity and frequency of railway trains at a great
station, but irregularly, at great intervals of time, and often at
night or in a fog. Taking all this into consideration, it is evident
how little prospect of success is offered for the special employment of
submarines against American transports.’
This is all sound enough, and in fact the U-boats have only succeeded
in killing 126 men out of the first million landed from America. But
the argument of Admiral von Holtzendorff does not explain the official
assurances by which the German public was deceived for more than a
year, and it only partially explains the ill success of the U-boats.
That could only be fully done by considering the offensive (or
offensive-defensive) action of war-ship against submarine--which will
be touched upon presently.
The record of the ‘bag’ made during the War by our own submarines has
never yet been published in a complete form. Yet it is a most striking
one, and ought effectually to remove any impression that the German
Submarine Service is in any way superior--or even equal--to ours. In
three years of war our boats sank over 300 enemy vessels. We lost, of
course, many more; but when it is remembered that we were offering to
our enemies every week more than four times as many targets as they
offered us during the whole three years, it will be admitted that
the comparison is not one to give them much ground for satisfaction.
At present, however, this general comparison is not the one which we
wish to make--we are concerned now with attacks on war-ships, or armed
forces, and not on mercantile shipping. The greater part of our record
is made up of such attacks, and it is now possible to give a short
summary of them.
There have been, during this War, practically only three
hunting-grounds where British submarines could hope to meet with enemy
war-ships, transports, or supply ships. These are the North Sea, the
Baltic, and the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora. Of the work done by
our submarines in the Baltic and Dardanelles we shall have separate
accounts to give in later chapters. For the present, it is enough
to tabulate the results. In the Baltic the bag included, besides a
large number of steamers (some carrying iron ore for military use),
the following war-ships: three destroyers, three transports, one old
battleship or cruiser, one light cruiser, and one armed auxiliary. In
the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora were sunk or destroyed the following,
besides a very large number of ships with stores or provisions for
the troops in Gallipoli: two battle-ships, four gun-boats, one armed
German auxiliary, seven transports, three ammunition ships and one
ammunition train, destroyed by gunfire. We may add, as a note to these
two parts of our record, that the work was done, not by a large number
of submarines issuing in relays from a home base close at hand, and
equipped with every kind of facility for repairing defects or relieving
tired crews, but by an almost incredibly small number of boats, working
far from their base, in closed waters, and under difficulties such as
no German boat has ever successfully attempted to face.
There remains the North Sea patrol. The first success in this record
stands against a famous name--that of Commander Max Horton, who (in
his boat E. 9) afterwards established what has been called ‘The
Command of the Baltic.’ In September 13, 1914, he was in the North
Sea, near to enemy forces. He was submerged, and not in the happiest
of circumstances, for one of his officers was ill, and to afford him
some relief from the exhausted atmosphere below, it became imperatively
necessary to rise to the surface. No sooner was the periscope above
water, than the commander sighted a German light cruiser, the _Héla_,
in a position where she might be expected to see the periscope and
attack at any moment. Fortunately a torpedo-tube was loaded and
bearing. Commander Horton took a snap-shot and dived. The shot went
home, and the _Héla_ troubled the patrol of E. 9 no more. On October
6, a German destroyer (S. 116) fell to another shot from the same hand.
After this, game was much scarcer. The German Admiralty tried to
establish a paper command of the North Sea, kept up (for the benefit
of the German public) by runaway raids on our East Coast towns; but
anything like a regular patrol was impossible to discover. In the
following eighteen months, however, our submarines did succeed in
two attacks on stray German destroyers, and four on armed auxiliary
vessels. Lieut.-Commander Benning (E. 5) hit an auxiliary in April
1915, but did not sink her. In June, Lieut.-Commander Moncrieffe
hit another, the _America_, so badly that she was run ashore. In
September, Commander Benning sank a third outright; and in December,
Lieut.-Commander Duff-Dunbar (E. 16) secured a larger one of 3,000
tons. Of the destroyers, the first (V. 188) was got by Commander C. P.
Talbot, in E. 16, on July 26; and the second on February 4, 1916, by
Lieut.-Commander H. W. Shove, in E. 29. This was a boat of the ‘S. 138’
class, but she could not be further identified, nor did any British eye
actually witness her final disappearance.
The rest of the bag is, for the most part, a forbidden subject. The
items are many, the loss to the enemy was great; but as he is racking
his brains to get or guess the details, it is no part of our business
to help him. There are, however, two items of which we may speak with
open satisfaction. One is the capture of a German trawler--of this we
have already heard from the Admiral Commanding our Submarine Base,
in Chapter IV. The simple story is that Lieut.-Commander G. Kellett,
finding his boat (S. 1) so far disabled that she could not get home
on her own engines, took over a German trawler by force, without
attracting undue attention, and came safely into port, towed from enemy
waters by an enemy boat. The remaining item hardly falls within our
range; but though not submarine work, it is work actually done by a
submarine, and may be classed, perhaps, with the destruction of the
ammunition train by Lieut.-Commander Cochrane at Yarandji. On May 4,
1916, a Zeppelin (L. 7) fell to Lieut.-Commander F. E. B. Feilman, in
E. 31, and he brought home seven of her crew as prisoners.
Even this is not all. In 1916, our submarines inflicted on the
German Fleet itself four blows, which, though they were none of them
actually fatal, must yet have been extremely damaging to the nerve
of the Service, and certainly cost heavily for repairs both in time
and labour. On August 19, the _Westfalen_--a battle-ship of 18,000
tons, built in 1908--was torpedoed by Lieut.-Commander Turner, in
E. 23. On October 19, Lieut.-Commander Jessop severely damaged the
light cruiser _München_, of 3,200 tons; and on November 5, Commander
Lawrence (in J. 1) achieved the brilliant feat of torpedoing two German
Dreadnoughts--the _Grosser Kurfurst_, which was laid down in 1913 and
finished since the War began, and the _Kronprinz_, which was both laid
down and commissioned since August 1914. A success of this kind, though
not final, may well be set against the sinking of much older and more
vulnerable ships, like the _Formidable_, _Triumph_, and _Majestic_;
and it must be remembered that the disappearance of these three from
our Navy List, however regrettable, had absolutely no effect on the
relative strength of the British and German Battle Fleets; whereas the
loss, for some months at any rate, of two great Dreadnoughts like the
_Grosser Kurfurst_ and _Kronprinz_--coming as it did shortly after the
Jutland losses--carried the inferiority of Admiral von Scheer’s force
to the point of impotence. In the match of submarine against war-ship,
our boats had succeeded where the U-boats had signally failed.